A major new change has come to the weekly exhibition: from now on, doodles and drawings created in Autodesk SketchBook will be included! SketchBook combines the best of Photoshop with Microsoft Paint to quickly and easily create with artists’ favourite tools, including pencils, drawing pens, paintbrushes and Copic markers.

While any colours can be used in SketchBook, I prefer colouring with the Copic palette, as it brings my digital art closer to how it would be if it had been coloured traditionally – with a black inking pen and markers (not necessarily Copic).

To try out these exciting features, I drew some more doodles of some of the city fan characters from the IAmMatthewian Project (Project Canada).

Lucas Wilson, Etienne Maisonneuve & Vernon Mann

First up is a redrawing of this doodle, starring Toronto (Lucas Wilson), Montreal (Etienne Maisonneuve) and Vancouver (Vernon Mann). With bold black outlines and more muted colours, this version is much cleaner and less louder than the other. In an attempt to diversify my artworks, each of the characters are given differing skin tones, which due to the wide Copic range of colours is easier than ever. The characters’ names are written in a custom downloaded font to add a more personal and professional touch. As before, their outfits are based on the hometowns’ flags, which can be seen in the aforementioned post.

Calvin McCall & Edward Murphy

Fan favourites Calgary (Calvin McCall) and Edmonton (Edward Murphy) – both created by Hapo on Tumblr – also get doodled. The patches on Calgary’s Stetson hat were created using the rough pastel tool in black, while his spurs are sprayed with grey glow paint to give a silvery sheen. Diverse skin tones are also played with in Edmonton’s brown flesh, where previously I had coloured him with white skin. By colouring him brown, this is more faithful to Hapo’s portrayal of Edmonton.

Like this:

With spring just arrived, warmer temperatures are on the way… after the rain showers, of course. Many people long to say goodbye to their winter wares for another few months and show off their skin to get its annual dose of Vitamin D.

Inspired by the warmer climes, I drew New Brunswick from Project Canada in a more beach-like outfit. While her usual wear is sunny in itself, no-one exactly walks on soft sand in high heels, since they would keep getting stuck.

Marie McCain

New Brunswick’s summer outfit mostly remains the same as her usual one, but with a few additions. Her pearl necklace, as I drew her with then, becomes a ship’s-helm necklace (which she often wears), she wears an Alice-blue bow on her head, light azure leggings under her shorts, and her red high heels become more suitable open-toed sandals. Her anchor tattoo remains.

In this form, New Brunswick’s appearance was mostly inspired by May from Pokémon; specifically, her design in Omega Ruby/Alpha Sapphire. I would later draw May in her different forms she’s appeared in so far:

After seeing Hapo‘s timeline for each of the province and territory characters from Project Canada, I became inspired to create ‘character wardrobes’ for each one, showing their different outfits for different purposes and from different ages. So far, I’ve only drawn three – for British Columbia, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia – though I did plan to do all thirteen provinces and territories.

The city fan characters of the IAmMatthewian Project are a dying breed compared to their newer Project Canadareincarnations. With the exceptions of Calgary, Edmonton and possibly Regina and Saskatoon, many of the characters have had a dramatic makeover in both personality and style.

You could then consider this drawing a sort of last hurrah for the older versions of Victoria and Vancouver before I finally started to draw the newer versions as of 2017. As the title implies, this is a meeting-up of the biggest cities of the western and eastern coast of Canada, and it’s also a great wordplay reversal of the common phrase “East meets West”.

From left to right:

Victoria

Vancouver

Halifax (Henry)

Dartmouth (Diana)

(I still drew the older versions of Halifax and Dartmouth as late as 2016, but mostly left the others to the past.)

This drawing is actually a redraw of another artwork I saw online by Misharoyuki on DeviantArt, which is seen below and was obviously re-interpreted into my own artistic style: